BAD MEDICINE: DOCTORS DOING HARM SINCE HIPPOCRATES (2006)

The antidote to every cheerful timeline of medical progress. Wootton argues that for most of its history medicine did patients little good and probably a great deal of harm, and that doctors only really justified themselves with antisepsis and germ theory in the nineteenth century. He moves from Hippocrates and Galen through John Snow and cholera to Fleming and penicillin, asking each time what a treatment actually did for the person receiving it. Plenty of historians think he overstates the case, and that argument is part of the fun. Read it after Porter, or alongside him, and you will never take a "breakthrough" story at face value again.